Toxic leak threatens Kalamazoo water

Jill McLane Baker | Kalamazoo GazetteJames Puchel-Ludwick, an environmental tester from Wilcox Professional Services LLC of Cadillac, measures water depth in monitoring wells on the site of the old McDonald's Total gas station on the corner of Westnedge and Crosstown in Kalamazoo. The city of Kalamazoo has wells nearby that provide drinking water, north of Axtell Creek. Those wells were shut off for five years because of pollution from the site of the former gas station.

KALAMAZOO -- For the first time in 10 years, the city of Kalamazoo is again pumping water from municipal wells near South Park Street and Crosstown Parkway.

A nearby storage tank below the now-shuttered McDonald's Total Crosstown Service Station leaked gasoline in 1997. The plume of pollution migrated through groundwater to within 100 feet of the city wells, part of a drinking-water system that serves more than 120,000 people.

In 1998, the state paid to remove the leaking tanks and gasoline-soaked soil and install a system to pump out the contaminated groundwater before it could get to the wells grouped beside Axtell Creek.

Between 2001 and 2002, more than 100 million gallons of polluted water was removed, the work was never finished.

"Then they ran out of funding to keep the system going," said John Paquin, water-resources manager for the city of Kalamazoo. "We've essentially kept the well-field off line because of that."

The former McDonald's gas station, which has sat empty since the late 1990s, is among the most serious cases of underground pollution in Kalamazoo County because of its proximity to a source of drinking water, state officials say. While officials stress that the city's water supply is safe because of frequent monitoring, chronic underfunding at the state level has kept cleanups at other sites around the city from being completed.

The city's water system - the state's second-largest groundwater-based system - serves not only city residents but also customers in the northern part of Portage, the village of Richland and seven surrounding townships.

A statewide problem
There are at least 135 sites where gasoline has leaked from underground storage tanks in the city of Kalamazoo. Those sites account for 75 percent of the leaks in Kalamazoo County.

Some of those leaks of gasoline or other hazardous chemicals were first reported in the 1980s. Others have been reported as recently as 2004. None has been fully cleaned up, state records show.

Statewide, there are approximately 9,000 releases of gas from underground tanks at 7,000 sites, officials say. And while hundreds of sites are cleaned up each year, hundreds more are reported.

"The reason there are 9,000 of them is because, since the turn of the century, we weren't always checking that kind of stuff," said Kenneth Vermeulen, a partner in the Grand Rapids law firm Warner Norcross & Judd. "And we were using bare steel tanks that rusted."

Vermeulen led a state advisory committee that recommended how lawmakers should spend a gasoline tax to clean up sites.

On every gallon of gasoline sold in Michigan, a 7/8-cent fee is levied. The revenues from that fee - approximately $60 million a year - are deposited in the Refined Petroleum Fund. The state created the fund in 2004 to pay for underground cleanups at orphan sites, like the McDonald's site in Kalamazoo, where the person responsible for cleaning up the mess can't pay.

But $60 million a year doesn't even come close to taking care of the problem, Vermeulen said. The problem is so widespread that it needs at least two to three times that much money a year, he said.

Making matters worse, he said, state lawmakers and Gov. Jennifer Granholm have taken $70 million from the fund over the last three years to close holes in the state budget.

"The law that authorized this fund was very clear in how that money was to be used," Vermeulen said. "As a member of the public, if the Legislature sets rules for itself and collects my tax dollars under those rules, they should spend that money under those rules."

Five-year delay
Cleanup at the McDonald's Total site received an infusion of new funding this year from the Refined Petroleum Fund, allowing work to start back up after five years of inactivity.

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is spending $85,000 this year to do additional investigation of the extent of the pollution at the site, run the groundwater pumping system and to treat the contaminated water that is removed, said Joseph Hayes, an environmental quality analyst in the DEQ's Kalamazoo office, who is managing the project.

City officials gave the state a discount on the cost of treating the contaminated water in order to get the project going again, Hayes said.

The five wells along Axtell Creek are a small portion of the city's 102 drinking-water wells and are only turned on at times of peak demand, Paquin said. But drawing water there gives the system a lot more flexibility, he said. It has been running off and on since the beginning of the month to compensate for the area's drought.

"We've never run out of water, but how we manage the system is complicated," he said. "With a field turned off, we have to get a little more creative with our operations."

Preventing future problems
Gasoline pollution from the McDonald's site is of the highest concern to city and state officials because of its proximity to municipal water wells. If left untreated, the pollution could reach a wellhead in a year or less.

There are 20 other sites that the city is aware of where pollution could reach city wells within a year. At least 10 of those sites are current or former gas stations, where 15 releases have been reported. Some go back as far as 1989 and others are as recent as 2004, state records show.

"It's important to understand that there are safeguards in place," Hayes said.

"To operate those wells requires serious monitoring and routine sampling," he said. "I don't think there is a risk because the water supply is monitored. If there were contamination, we'd shut down (the pumps)."

To prevent more problems for the city's water supply, Paquin said, the City Commission adopted new zoning rules this spring that will prevent new businesses that use or store certain chemicals from locating in 11 zones that are near city wells.